Many gospel stories are an invitation to look deeper after the initial literal story.

I'm rushing this to get it posted before I leave early tomorrow morning, so it's not going to be polished but hopefully you will get the drift.:-))

Some years back when I was ready to leave the security of work and home and head off to East Africa to work I bought a book by an author called Donagh O'Shea OP, called Take Nothing for The Journey, subtitled Meditations on Time and Place.

After 10 years in a busy retreat centre in Cork, the priest was weary from overwork and was afforded as he puts it : the luxury or the necessity of a sabbatical year. He chose to spend the first 3 months living in a tent in different parts of Ireland that held special significance for him. It is a wonderful book.

At the end of his travels he returns home for the first Sunday of Advent and he says this is a good time for beginnings and endings."The Liturgy conveys a sense of an old world ending and a new world beginning.

An end that was only an end would be annihilation : you believe in the Lord of Life and the end can never be the end..."

He says " The soul must go out; it must travel away from itself, above itself." But it must never leave the centre; indeed it cannot leave- because every place in the world is the centre, every moment a sacrament of eternity.

In the heart of every man and woman you meet you will reach out to the centre of creation and touch eternity- if you do not waver from your emptiness.

That sign made a deep impression on me. Indeed within one year I did indeed move to Cornwall and then again after another few years to a job in Malawi, East Africa and then eventually back to Cornwall.

Whoever you are, go out into the evening, leaving your room, of which you know each bit; your house is the last before the infinite, whoever you are. Then with your eyes that wearily scarce lift themselves from the worn-out door-stone slowly you raise a shadowy black tree and fix it on the sky: slender, alone. And you have made the world (and it shall grow and ripen as a word, unspoken, still). When you have grasped its meaning with your will, then tenderly your eyes will let it go.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Summer Morning

Heart,
I implore you,
it’s time to come back
from the dark,

it’s morning,
the hills are pink
and the roses
whatever they felt

in the valley of night
are opening now
their soft dresses,
their leaves

are shining.
Why are you laggard?
Sure you have seen this
a thousand times,

which isn’t half enough.
Let the world
have its way with you,
luminous as it is

I have added a few extra reflections this year to go with the poem by Naomi Shihab Nye at the bottom of this post. (The poem is also in my 2011 post.)

When I read this gospel I wonder about the fuel behind the disciples mission. It strikes me that there must have come a pivotal moment when Christ knew they were ready to go out on their journey to spread his message and to heal.

They had witnessed first hand the compassion and kindness of Christ in action, through His words, yes, through His miracles yes, but by something else less tangible but even more compelling- His ability to be totally present to others.

The poem by Naomi Shihab Nye speaks about kindness which certainly resonates with a Franciscan heart. I have chosen it because I think it encapsulates what our churches should be : places where the quality of presence allows kindness to be expressed as a priority, not always the more obvious "do gooder" type of activity often associated with the type of welcome to parish life that can be massively cloying, claustrophobic and intrusive.

The poem tells a salutary tale of where the deep quality of kindness has to come from before it rings true.

Mission without kindness has no meaning and mission has to operate from a deep personal knowledge or empathy of what it means to be human these days and the recognition that life for many is a struggle.

“Life is complex and the idea that you can break it down or fix it in
a few steps is rather silly. The truth is there are a million steps,
and we don’t even know what the steps are, and worse, at any given
moment we may not be willing or even able to take them; and still worse,
they are different for you and me and they are always changing.

"I have
come to believe the sooner we find this truth beautiful, the sooner we
will fall in love with the God who keeps shaking things up, keeps
changing the path, keeps rocking the boat to test our faith in Him,
teaching us not to rely on easy answers, bullet points, magic mantras,
or genies in lamps, but rather His guidance, His existence, His mercy,
His love.”

-Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What

Too many people in our churches seem only interested in others for gossip sake or to try and size people up for a potential role.There is also a type of helper often seen in churches who fosters a type of co-dependency or worse still, who feeds off others to boost their own importance and self esteem.

Some priests can be too over eager to enlist people in some worthy cause before they even understand anything about that person and what makes them tick.

When the disciples arrived at their destination the people who received them would have known something of the hardships they had encountered on the way; but maybe people who welcomed them were able to also see something deeper; to the fact that they had given up everything to follow Christ and had a resolve to spread His message wherever they could, in spite of the ridicule, rejection and persecution

that would inevitably follow.

But also, maybe some people were able to decipher their receptivity and sensitivity to the less visible but enormously influential hardships that people can meet on their life journey and that type of care needs to be nurtured in our churches.

Kindness isn't trying to exhort people to think positive, or the usual glib cliche of counting our blessings, because someone else has it harder.

This pithy quotation comes from the foreward of a book called The
Laughter of God: At Ease With Prayer by Sister Miriam Pollard.

"Anguish is not healed by crushing its victim under the weight of
every truth you know. It is healed, or at least assuaged, by listening,
by time and acceptance, and often by giving to the other the sense that
you also have lived without answers."

The quality of making yourself available, to be with someone to allow them space and time entails a necessary distance ; an approaching without approaching quality that enables trust to slowly develop.

That is something that takes great skill and time and yet it is also something that is easy to spot when a person enters a church or a community.

It is a pervasive quality of Christ's presence in another that will attract people to church,

something that is radiated and felt not always in words,

or even in acts but more often just in the simple act of being with another and showing compassion.

Of course, it follows on that true compassion is a force that will then lead to action.

If it doesn't, it is a "cheap grace", the kind of which Bonhoeffer identified and described so well.

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean
the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving
advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and
touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be
silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us
in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not
curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness,
that is a friend who cares. "

I believe the fuel that enables all of us to take nothing else for the
journey is something we can ask to be filled with every day. The paradox
is that the fuel is always given to us freely by God and is in endless supply. It is something we cannot even
earn but it may cost us something - our own ego and self will.

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“History says, Don't hope On this side of the grave,But then, once in a lifetime,The longest-for tidal wave of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme.So hope for a great sea changeOn the far side of revengeBelieve in miracles....”

“The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.” ―

“I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.”

and five more......

On his inspiration: 'The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis”

On which animal he'd prefer to be:"I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks."

On fame:"The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself. The prizes can’t help you at all.”

On becoming a poet:"My quest for precision and definition, while it may lead backward, is conducted in the living speech of a landscape and a language that I was born with. If you like, I began as a poet when my roots were crossed with my reading."

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Celtic Christianity may offer us a lifeline in the form of an approach to faith which is rooted in the imagination...[Celts] excelled at expressing their faith in symbols, metaphors and images, both visual and poetic.They had the ability to invest the ordinary and commonplace with sacramental significance, to find glimpses of God’s glory throughout creation and to paint pictures in words, signs and music that acted as icons opening windows on heaven and pathways to eternityIan Bradley The Celtic Way

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“Thanks to magnanimity, we can always look at the horizon from the position where we are. That means being able to do the little things of every day with a big heart open to God and to others. That means being able to appreciate the small things inside large horizons, those of the kingdom of God.

This offers parameters to assume a correct position for discernment, in order to hear the things of God from God’s ‘point of view.’ … However the risk in seeking and finding God in all things, then, is the willingness to explain too much, to say with human certainty and arrogance: ‘God is here.’ We will find only a god that fits our measure. The correct attitude is that of St. Augustine: seek God to find him, and find God to keep searching for God forever.”﻿

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Carlo Caretto's Love Letter to His Church

How much I much criticise you my church and yet how much I love you !

You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe you more than I owe anyone. I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence.

You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness. Never in the world have I seen anything more obscurantist, more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous or more beautiful.

Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face – and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your arms!

No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you. Then too – where should I go? To build another church?

But I cannot build another church without the same defects, for they are my own defects. And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ’s church. No, I am old enough. I know better!"

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Did the Woman Say ?

Did the Woman Say?

Did the woman say,When she held him for the first time in the dark of a stable,After the pain and the bleeding and the crying,‘This is my body, this is my blood’?

Did the woman say,When she held him for the last time in the dark rain on a hilltop,After the pain and the bleeding and the dying,‘This is my body, this is my blood’?

Well that she said it to him then,For dry old men,brocaded robes belying barrennessOrdain that she not say it for him now.

~Frances Croake Frank

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A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.

Sidney Sheldon

There are things you can’t reach. Butyou can reach out to them, and all day long.The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

Mary Oliver

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– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"There is an Indian proverb or axiom that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional, and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but, unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person."

~Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms, 1989

“And""You can get all A's and still flunk life." "Lost in the mystery of finding myself alive."

Walker Percy

"The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom”

A tough life needs a tough language-and that's what poetry is. That's what literature offers- a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.Jeanette Winterson

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “All right, then, have it your way.”

- C.S. Lewis

The independent hearts of Celtic descendents everywhere still yearn for the solitary place, still rejoice in the goodness of creation, still see the Lord beside them as they walk, still see Him in the face of friend and stranger. The gospel light with its eastern fire still gleams. The truth still lingers in the heart.Pat Robson – The Celtic Heart

People are itchy and lost and bored and quick to jump at any fix. Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do all these selves need help?

They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture. They have been deprived of the sense that there is something else in life, some purpose that has come with them into the world."

-- James Hillman

Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government only when it deserves it.--Mark Twain

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.--George Orwell

We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice: - we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.-- George Orwell

Never for the sake of peace and quiet deny your own experience or convictions.--Dag Hammarskjöld

If you want to build a ship don't herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

For what are we, without hope in our hearts, that someday we'll drink from God's blessed waters?" -Bruce Springsteen

"Sometimes grace works like waterwings when you feel you are sinking."-Anne Lamott

"A prayer may be a wordless inner longing, a sudden outpouring of love, a yearning within the soul to be for a moment united within the infinite and the good, a humbleness that needs no abasement or speech to express it, a cry in the darkness for help when all seems lost, a song, a poem, a kind deed, a reaching for beauty, or the strong, quiet inner reaffirmation of faith. A prayer in fact can be anything that is created by God that turns to God."

Paul Gallico

"God does not die when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason."

Dag Hammarskjold

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.”

― Paul Hawken

The greatest religious challenge of our age is to hold together social action and spiritual disciplines. This is not just a theological necessity, dictated by the need to integrate all of life around the reality of the living God. It is a matter of sheer survival. The evils we confront are so massive, so inhuman, so impervious to appeals and dead to compassion, that those who struggle against them face the real possibility of being overwhelmed by them.”

~ Theologian Walter Wink

One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours?I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.

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